Managing a Global Team

Global Leadership

One of the trends that has emerged in strategic management over the last generation is how organizations can better position themselves to deal with diversity. As globalization continues to spread its influence, many multinational corporations have to actively manage global teams in a dynamic environment. This requires that global teams overcome diversity in stride with strategic objectives. William Pieroni, chief operations officer at Marsh who is a global leader in insurance broking and risk management shared his tactics for managing global teams with students at the Yale School of Management; Marsh has 25,000 employees based in 150 countries around the world (Yale School of Management, 2015).

"As the manager of large global teams, your job is to direct, align, and motivate all these people all over the world," Pieroni said. "And you can't be ambiguous." While each office within a large, multinational corporation has its own "unique, local culture," it's critical that they all adhere to a central vision so that everyone is working toward the same end, Pieroni said. For managers, this means creating strategy that is specific, quantifiable, and actionable. "Too many C-level executives overestimate that their goals are easily translatable into daily work," Pieroni said. "Making strategy work is very different from making strategy." (Yale School of Management, 2015)

Pieroni is directly hitting a central theme in modern strategic management that deals with localization versus standardization. An international company must find a balance between finding operational efficiencies by standardizing processes in global operations and dealing with cultural and diversity related issues in global teams. There has been a significant body of research accumulated addressing the factors that surround business process redesign in regards to international expansion because it often represents a critical success factor (Sarkar & Cavusgil, 2007). For example, you can actively plan for dealing with diversity in international operations and actually build this into the strategic design of new initiatives. The organization can position themselves to overcome cultural and communication barriers.

Managing global teams can add a layer of complexity to strategic management because not only does you strategy have to be competitive in a global environment, but it has to be able to be implemented in a geographically and culturally diverse organization. One factor that affects a firm's competitiveness in such an environment in such an arrangement is how well knowledge transfers in an organization across international borders (Tsai, 2001). For example, if a global team leader can quickly disseminate information and have it put to use in operations quickly and effectively then the organization can be more competitive globally and one way to study this is to look at organizational knowledge and the manner in which is crosses boarders and divisions.